On Dec 20, 2007 10:22 AM, Lennart Poettering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi! > > Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this > thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this > thread: > > Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a > problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's > not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, > aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop > use (Jack) or not a sound server at all (Phonon, X11 audio extension). PA is > the only sound server that is maintained, useful on the desktop and not a > total mess of code. PA has been shipped of Fedora 8, it is thus not brand-new > untested software, but a big part of the major issues and limitations have > already been mitigated or fixed. All other relevant Linux distributions have > now decided to ship and enable PA by default in their next stable releases, > too. (OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu). So, it's not that OpenSolaris would > pioneer on this, all you need to do is follow the beaten paths. The major > problems are already solved. >
Yes, and all of them had grand plans at one time too, and now, as you point out, they're dead. > Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not > nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently > working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. > Claims that it is not as powerful without specific examples are not helpful. My personal experience with ALSA as a developer has always been less then pleasant. I have always preferred OSS, even on GNU/Linux systems. > Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have > been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we > could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with > "Slow" and ends with "aris". ;-) Oh, and a couple of device manufacturers > ship PA on mobile phones and GPS devices. And Nokia is now working on > integrating it into Maemo too. So again, adoption is a non-issue. Besides > maybe OpenSolaris, everyone who could adopt it has adopted it. > It isn't adopted yet; at least not by any platform but GNOME, and only by some distributions. Notably, KDE3 and KDE4 both currently lack official backends for it. That means at best, it has only recently been adopted by GNOME-based distributions. KDE users still have the current issues. Trolltech does not officially have a pulseaudio backend for Phonon. > Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than "most > GNU/Linux", is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good "audio support" also > requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris > by far on that. > How so? Are you aware the OSS provides full 5.1, 7.1, software mixing, etc.? Are you aware that it actually supports many devices that ALSA does not? > PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like > moving live streams between devices, network support and whatever. This is > all stuff raw OSS cannot do. > Which users may or may not need. I don't have any need of those features. "desktop integration" is too vague for me to comment on. > servo claims it is a bad design decision to do mixing and stuff in software. > Quite frankly that claim is bogus. Modern sound cards don't even do hw mixing > anymore. To find a soundcard which still does this you have to find one that > has been manufactured more than 5 years ago or so. Mixing audio is not > exactly the most CPU intensive code in existance. After all SSE and MMX > primary purpose is to speed up things like this. Also, that legacy hw that > still does hw mixing only provides a limited number of concurrent streams, so > if you want to mix more you have to fall back to sw mixing anyway. You > remember the time when every sound card came with wavetable logic? It's the > same with hw mixing, that time is ended, over, finito. And it is good that > way. Modern sound cards (like those following Intel's HDA) are usually not > much more than good DACs, and sometimes don't even do hw volume control but > instead rely on software for that. > Sorry, but that's just wrong. Modern sound cards *do* still have hardware mixing. Every Creative Labs card still supports hardware mixing, as does almost every single add-in hardware device. While it is true that many on-board sound chipsets may not support hardware mixing, it is not true that "modern sound cards don't even do hw mixing anymore." Sound cards still being made that do hardware mixing and gamers are more likely to have them. Quite frankly, I don't feel PulseAudio has justified it's functionality enough. While I will be the first to agree that it is certainly more promising in some regards than past approaches, some of your claims are not sufficiently justified. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
